Meet the co-founders of Lotuly
My name is Mariona Bolohan and I’m a multilingual entrepreneur, running Lotuly a bootstrapped and eco-friendly translation agency along with my business partner who also happens to be my husband, Robert Bolohan, who speaks 4 languages.
Lotuly is a UK-based translation bureau, with a remote workforce, operating worldwide.
We specialise in human translation and localisation services. The kind that enable you and your customers to start meaningful conversations.
Our remote workforce includes more than five hundred native-speaking human translators, who work all over the world. Together they translate more than 90 different languages in more than 8,000 combinations.
What do we need to know about yourself and Robert?
We are striving to help businesses communicate with their customers in the language of their hearts and showing them a way to experience a world of understanding.
We both have a passion for languages and sustainability, we also love dogs and I personally enjoy playing the guitar and Robert loves to play football. Being a native Spanish & Catalan speaker I struggled with fear of rejection (my husband/business partner having Romanian roots too).
As a company we’ve managed to successfully onboard Fortune 500 companies and work with top startups giving us the push we needed and the support we craved. We doubled our revenue after launching and we hope to keep on growing sustainably.
When we came to England back in 2015 we started working as freelance translators mostly translating into Catalan and Spanish. We built a portfolio of all sorts of clients and little by little we managed to create a global team of translators.
One of the best implementations we’ve put in motion is planting trees for translated words through our partners Ecologi. We strive to help businesses communicate more effectively and in a meaningful way because we know how it feels to be misunderstood due to language barriers, I know how it feels to speak other languages, I know how it feels to always be the one that doesn’t fit in a place that it’s not your own country, so we created Lotuly with the goal of taking that weight off our clients’ shoulders.
I moved through those challenges and strived to help other young people overcome the same feelings of rejection. We give a lot of opportunities to young people, to work with us and feel appreciated no matter where they are from.
What does your business offer its target audience?
They get peace of mind, we offer high quality translations done by human experts and at the same time we make them feel good by giving back to our planet as a result of using our services by planting trees for translated words in places like Madagascar.
We offer either packages on a project basis or subscription packages where for a minimum of 2,000 words per month they can secure our time in exchange for a fee.
We also offer them the possibility of getting an online quote in seconds without the need of giving their personal details and you know what is the best part? Our clients always get the same quality, the only difference between prices is the deadline.
As a business owner, do you know when to walk away from a sale?
I know now but it has not always been the case, specially in the beginning, there was this feeling of guilt or fear of rejecting a project, you would always think, am I making a mistake by walking away? Am I throwing away an opportunity to work long term with this company/client? But there are several red flags that unfortunately I had to learn the hard way.
If a company does not want to pay upfront how do you know they’ll want to pay you afterwards? There was this client who I worked several times with, so there was trust between us and he always paid upfront, then suddenly he started asking for new projects but he did not pay me, he said that he would do in 30 days, as we had worked together before I trusted him, in the end I spent around 2 months working for this person and I only say a couple of hundreds of the total amount worth which was around $4k, to this day I haven’t seen the money,once I told him I wouldn’t do any other projects he ghosted me, unfortunately it happened again with a big dentist who has several clinics around europe. Since then, I’ve implemented several steps to avoid going through that situation again.
When they do not respect your boundaries or time. I’m available for my clients all of my working hours, and sometimes even more, I always try to go above and beyond each project but there was this time that a renowned doctor, she needed an urgent file translated within hours, I said that we can help her without a problem but then she asked me to do some copying and pasting (from one language to another, that means also checking that the translation already done is up to our standards of quality), which I said that is fine no problem, I’ll charge a small fee for the time invested doing that, which is normal, right? If you don’t have the time to do something then you pay someone to do that instead, isn't it? But of course she did not like that despite her consultancy turning over millions she was very concerned that I would charge her for my time as it was only copying and pasting, and well, unfortunately we did not end up collaborating as I found quite insulting what she said, but if it would have been when I started out I would probably have given in and let myself be disrespected not only with my time but also from the way she spoke to me and working without being paid.
This is why I always encourage people who are starting out to have their values and boundaries very clear because if they do, clients will see that and they won’t be able to “play” with them.
Working with a co-founder can be tricky, so understanding and compromise is important. How have you both found the process of building a business together? What makes it work?
I think it’s important that you have your goals clear before starting out, disagreements will come like in any relationship but it’s how you approach them and deal with them that will determine whether you can continue or not.
In our case it just worked great because we already knew each other and even though Robert started it for the first months afterwards we got in it together and it just worked.
What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?
I think it would be: I’m trying to reach a new market, my copy is in English and well, it’s also translated with Google Translate but I’m not getting the ROI that I was expecting.
And for us it’s a no brainer, if your copy is not in the language of your customers heart it will not appeal to them as much, but if your copy is but is done with Google Translate how will your customer feel? What impression does that give them of your company, perhaps they will think that you did not put the effort nor the funds to reach them? That you used GT and they should be happy about that? You see, your customers want to feel appreciated and one way you can achieve that is by allocating a budget and investing in translation, otherwise how are you going to sell your business to them? How will you reach them?
A lot of companies have seen a huge improvement in their sales by having their content translated by a human expert translator.
Another problem that is massive is that people think that just because you speak two languages that automatically makes you a translator, and that is not true, you may be able to translate some basic stuff but to fully immerse yourself and convey the meaning of a copy from one language to another is art, and people study and train themselves for years in order to do that, because you want people to think that the copy was written in their mother language and not translated from another language.
What are your top tips for entrepreneurs wanting to get their business out there?
Be ready for all the unexpected things and feelings, it is not as easy as it seems, you will not start a business and then suddenly be rich and be able to work from anywhere, depending on what kind of business you get into, either a service based business or a product based business, specially the first years will be very exhausting. From a service based business perspective, some marketing strategies will work better than others, for example PPC is quite hard when you are a service based business because people are not buying a product like a T-shirt, they are buying a service so in our case SEO might be better suited as it will help us achieve organic growth even if it takes longer. PPC can give you plenty of visitors but few or non existent conversions, as it happened with us in the beginning so we had to refine our strategy.
Prioritise your mental and physical health, if you are not well no one will be able to care for your business, or what is a business if you are not able to enjoy it?
Always trust your gut feeling, if something doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t.
Detach yourself from rejections, don’t take them personally, learn from them and move on, there is no point in thinking about it. You can’t force someone to understand the importance of your product or the good you are doing to their business and eventually the ROI, if they don’t see the value, move on to the next one.
What’s your best advice for early-stage tech founders getting ready to launch their MVP?
Don’t wait until everything is perfect because as a business owner it’ll never be, we delayed our launch almost a year just because we wanted to have everything perfect but in the end in our eyes, there’s still so many things to do but your advantage is that your customers do not know that, so get your MVP out there as soon as it’s presentable and gather feedback. Aim to launch your MVP in 1 month and test over and over and tweak.
Ask as many people as you can for feedback and tell them to please tell you what they like but most importantly what they don’t like, some feedback will sting a bit but it may help you to push your business forward as they may see something that you did not.
What plans do you have for ‘your business’ over the next two years?
Integrate with more marketing agencies our API (we have a quotation tool where by selecting the pair of language, subject and word count you will be given an automatic quote in seconds without the need of giving any personal information).
Also develop and tweak more our MVP by integrating the function where our clients will be able to see how many trees we are planting as a result of their project since the beginning, now we have to tell them manually but in the near future we hope to integrate this option.
Be in the top 3 translation agencies in the UK that put human translation at the forefront of everything and invest highly in the environment/offsetting its carbon footprint and at the same time put a lot of emphasis in treating translators with the respect they deserve.
Has the COVID-19 crisis placed more pressure on the mental health of business owners?
Definitely, because before Covid-19, even though we worked from home we would still go outside, go buy something from the store, meet with friends, go out for a drink, etc but when covid hit and we were unable to go outside or meet people that meant that you would be in the house 24/7, as an entrepreneur launching their business that meant for us being in front of a screen from morning till night because we would feel guilty for stopping working when we had so much to do and we couldn’t go out so what was the alternative? So I think for a lot of business owners it made it even more difficult to focus on their mental health during Covid-19.
Also the uncertainty, a lot of businesses were out of business because of Covid-19 so that put a lot of pressure to find new clients, especially in the translation industry, as translation is viewed as a commodity and not a necessity so some businesses stopped translating their content and put that budget somewhere else in the business.
How do you prepare for an AI centric world?
We are very onboard with AI and new technologies, they have made life easier in a lot of industries, unfortunately for the translation industry it has done a lot of damage and it has also confused a lot of people.
There are many variations within a common language depending on the region that is spoken that AI could not understand it and let alone translate it properly.
Take as an example Spanish, Spanish from Spain is different from Spanish from Latin America, but in Latin America depending on the region (Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Nicaragua, etc) in each of those regions they have different ways of saying the same thing. AI would not have cultural awareness; only a human expert translator would be able to do that.
We embrace technology so much we’ve made our potential clients’ lives easier by creating an instant quote tool for all their translation needs. They can either upload a file and it will count the words automatically or they can insert the number of words and several other details such as language pair and subject in order to get an instant price divided into 3 packages.
What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?
How will I solve my customers' problems?
Is anyone else doing what I want to do? If so, how can I improve it or make it different?
Will my customers have a nice experience using my product or service?
Am I ready to take on this responsibility?
Do I have enough savings for at least 6 months?
Can I dedicate enough time to this project and cope well mentally with a slight chance that getting clients takes time and that will potentially set you off financially?
